What do you think about that? These are my point of view:

• Manual procedures are very prone to errors
• Especially for upgrade it's a little annoying to move all those files around the filesystem (files, plugins, themes and so on)
• Upgrades happens once in a month and every time I need to read the walktrough on the site

Wouldn't be nicer if the install procedure would be as simple as cap redmine:install (or cap redmine:upgrade for the upgrade)?

I made a "proof of concept":http://www.codewithstyle.eu/2011/06/09/installing-redmine-using-capistrano/ of this and I used that to upgrade my installation from 1.1.2 to 1.2.0 and everything has worked. I tried to make things as generic as possible and I think this could be easily integrated directly in Redmine as an alternate method for installation/upgrade.

Otherwise if you're not interested it can be developed as standalone gem/project, but I think that if this is integrated directly in Redmine it could be more robust with supervision of developers.

Just my two cents.